After the dawdling disappointments of An Unexpected Journey, Peter Jackson gets back on track with this second instalment in his ongoing adaptation of Tolkien's slim novel – albeit with the addition of umpteen appendices to flesh out the narrative. With less whimsical waffle than its predecessor, The Desolation of Smaug sets off at a comparatively yomping pace and proceeds to throw an endless array of spectacular sights at the audience, eager to dazzle, ready to please.

Thus we head east, through the forest of Mirkwood with its creepy pre/post-Potter spiders; to the streets of Lake-town where the stench of fish hangs heavy in the Hammer-esque fog; then on to the lost kingdom of Erebor, a big-screen version of the Magic Mountain fairground ride replete with slidey loops and precipitous drops aplenty. En route we meet an assortment of fantastical characters of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Wood-elves (a surprise return by Orlando Bloom's Legolas and a newly made-up character, Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel), to the gigantic dragon Smaug, voiced (and motion-captured) by Benedict Cumberbatch, and brought to roaring life by the digital wizards at Weta. At the centre of it all is Martin Freeman, whose default expression of habitual bafflement (he appears to teeter perpetually on the brink of some conversational incline) is perfectly suited to the role of Bilbo Baggins – the friendly quizzicality hiding something behind the smile as he begins to comprehend both the powers and dangers of the ring.

While the sing-song reminiscing and endless tea-party pootlings of An Unexpected Journey are happily notable by their absence, the jury is still out on whether The Hobbit really needs to be strung out over nine hours of film. For all its hi-tech action sequences and handsomely mounted set pieces, you get a lot of bagginess with your Baggins, as the assembled masses march up hill and down dale, their ultimate goal still a long way off. It doesn't help that the constantly sweeping visuals sometimes have the air of a supercharged computer game (an ultra-modded version of Skyrim with mountain staircases by Minecraft?) or that sequences such as a barrel ride down a river seem tailor-made for the theme park market. Those agnostic on the subject of Tolkien's genius will sigh at all the usual tropes (here's a map, here's a key, and here's yet another character introduced in sombre tones as Hrithky Hroth of Biddly Bong, third cousin of Thriddledeedee the Thwarted) but more pressing is the question of whether devotees of the book will find their patience tested (perhaps exhausted?) by Jackson's everything-turned-up-to-11 aesthetic. As for the much-hyped high frame rate that proved so divisive last time around, only 20% of UK screenings of Smaug will be projected at 48 frames per second second, signalling a loss of confidence in the technical innovation The Hobbit trilogy was supposed to usher in.

Something of a mixed bag, then, with several question marks left hanging over the entire Hobbit project, but a definite improvement on the previous outing, and hopefully a portent of better things to come in There and Back Again.